The Mauritius based Rwazi startup focuses on expanding existing markets as it receives a $4 million round. The Investors include Bonfire Ventures, Newfund Capital, and Alumni Ventures.
Eric Sewankambo and Joseph Rutakangwa founded Rwazi, a market intelligence platform gives companies access to actionable data from emerging countries about who is buying what, where, when, and why.
In almost 40 countries in Africa and South Asia, they hire skilled mappers in disguise to collect information locally.
Rwazi plans to invest the money in growing its presence in new markets, particularly in South Asia and Latin America, in addition to the forty African countries where its products are already available.
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According to Rutakangwa, the two co-founded Rwazi out of frustration at the lack of access to timely market data in their previous positions. They decided to deal with the problem by offering market intelligence backed by information gleaned through polls of existing and potential customers.
More Rwazi on the funding
Rwazi hires locals, dubbed “mappers,” to probe people’s homes and businesses for intelligence. It is estimated that over 1.4 million stores in over 60 countries and countless cities and towns have been mapped by the company’s network of over 60,000 mappers.
These cartographers gather information about individual purchases, such as the size and quantity of a product, how often it is purchased, where the purchase is made, and how often, down to the unit level.
Once Rwazi verifies a mapper’s submission, the customer who made the purchase through the website or mobile app is liable for paying the mapper a commission.
According to Rutakangwa, the company plans to release multilingual items this year in order to break into new markets. He is confident that they will be able to grow in the current territories where they operate and attract a wider range of customers if they make their services available in many languages.
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